There is really no limit to the chutzpah of homebirth advocates.
Took castor oil at 41&2 and had contractions 2-3 min apart starting at 10 pm until I delivered the next day, Friday 7/26, at 5:15 pm. My first labor was only 12 hours, start to finish, so this really shocked us all… Delivered that way [half squat] with my midwife supporting my perenium. It is a boy! He was lifeless & they had to work to het him to pink up. He had apgars of 5/6/8 but swallowed fluid, had retractions in his abdomen, & would stop crying. After 30 min, they new he needed to be.transferred. I couldn’t pee & needed to be catheterized & stitched up had a 2nd degree tear all along my episiotomy scar.
The baby had to spend several days in the NICU but is now, apparently, fine. The folks in the NICU saved her baby’s life, but she’s mad at them.
Spent 2 days fighting them in the nicu & another in the less unit (they wouldn’t discharge us) I feel like he was abused & tramatized in there …
The NICU traumatized the baby? How about his own mother who nearly killed him for no better reason than bragging rights. She hired a midwife so incompetent that she had no idea she was about to deliver a lifeless baby. She labored at home without adequate monitoring. She let her baby spend hours nearly asphyxiating. She insisted on delivering far from the people and equipment that could have resuscitated the baby faster and possibly prevented a long NICU stay.
. I can’t shake this feeling that I really fucked up & shouldn’t have had a homebirth đ
Ya think?
There’s a lot she and other homebirth advocates can learn from this story:
1. Trusting birth is not a plan for success, but a plan for disaster.
2. A previously easy vaginal birth is not a guarantee that the next birth will be easy.
3. Homebirth midwives are incapable of assessing the wellbeing of babies. They typically have no idea what is going on until the baby drops into their hands half dead.
4. The NICU will save your baby’s life, but the people in it won’t be happy with the fact that you risked and nearly lost your baby’s life. They may well treat you as if you let your baby unsupervised to fall out the window, because that’s the equivalent of what you did. You left your baby totally unmonitored and “trusted” that nothing bad would happen. That strategy works no better with birth than with windows.
5. Don’t like the way your baby was treated? YOU were the proximate cause, not the NICU staff. He probably would never been in the NICU at all if it weren’t for your insistence on having a homebirth. I am not excusing anything less than 100% professional behavior toward the baby, but YOU put him in the NICU, so you bear some responsibility for his experience.
These incidents happen over and over and over again, and over and over and over again, both homebirth midwives and homebirth mothers refuse to take responsibility. Will the midwife undergo peer review for this disaster? Unlikely. Will she be required to have additional training in monitoring babies during labor? Almost certainly not? Will MANA, the organization that represents homebirth midwives, review its requirements in light of the unacceptably high rate of death and injury at homebirth? Not in this lifetime.
No doubt this mother would claim that she “educated” herself about homebirth and “takes responsibility” for her own medical decisions, but she hired an incompetent provider, labored in a place far from emergency assistance and then fought with the people in the NICU who were trying to save the baby’s life.
Proving yet again that you can’t become “educated” by reading the propaganda spewed forth by homebirth websites, homebirth midwives and homebirth advocates. And whining that the people in the NICU who saved your baby’s life traumatized him after you nearly killed him is the exact opposite of taking responsibility.
